This isn’t about what we saw this week from the Knicks, especially against two more teams better than they are. This isn’t about the way the Warriors got them at the Garden on a night when the Knicks didn’t have Karl-Anthony Towns, or about the way the Lakers of LeBron and Luka came back on Thursday night and finally beat them in overtime in Los Angeles. This isn’t really about what the Knicks have — or haven’t — done lately. This is about what they’re supposed to be and who they’re supposed to be, at least when Jalen Brunson is back on the court. That means right now, not next year.
It’s still fair, now that we’re in March, to once again ask a question we’ve asked a lot this season when the Knicks have gotten knocked all over the ring by the Thunder and Cavs and Celtics and Lakers (with and without Luka) and by Steph and the Warriors:
If they aren’t going to make a deep run into the playoffs now, then when?
Leon Rose didn’t trade for Towns or give up a pocketful of first-round draft choices for Mikal Bridges to simply hold the place his team made for itself last season, no matter how much fun they have provided this season. The Knicks were supposed to close the gap on Celtics, though Rose had no way of knowing, because no one did, that it would be the Cavs who not only closed the gap, but have passed the Celtics the way they have in the regular season.
Of course, there is still so much more of this Knicks story to be written. We have already seen how fast the story can change, the way it changed the other night when Brunson — once again playing offense like an all-time great Knick — rolled his ankle. Up until he did it looked, for one night anyway, as if the Knicks were finally about to flip the narrative on how they’ve looked against elite teams and knock off a Lakers team with LeBron and Luka that looks as if it is more than capable of making a deep run in the playoffs.
But then the Knicks fell apart down the stretch the way they did the same thing in Oklahoma City earlier in the season, on a night when it looked as if they were going to get the Thunder and get them good. They blew a 10-point lead with seven minutes to go against the Lakers, and after that it just looked as if LeBron and Luka had ganged up on Brunson, even though Brunson did make that tough and-one to tie things near the end of regulation.
And the team that Rose thought would get better still has to get a lot better over the rest of the regular season and then into the playoffs. Good for Rose for not standing still after last year. But now this is the team he wanted, and this is the team he’s getting and we’re getting, the one sitting five games behind the Celtics and a mile behind the Cavs. Has Towns put up Patrick Ewing-like numbers in points and rebounds? He has. He sure did get 14 rebounds against the Lakers. He also shot 3-for-13 from the floor and ended up with just 12 points in 42 minutes on a night when the Knicks needed more for him.
Then there is Bridges, so rarely looking like the player the Knicks thought they were getting. He played 43 minutes against the Lakers and scored a grand total of six points. So that was another night when Bridges did what Tom Thibodeau has been asking him do for most of the season. He ran to the corner and stayed there and waited for somebody to throw him the ball. He was better on Friday night against the Clippers with 22 points. Maybe he can build on that now with Brunson out for a couple of weeks.
The Knicks need more from him going forward, and not just on defense. The Knicks had to expect more from him when Rose spent five first-rounders to get him. Maybe even he wonders sometimes about the way he is being used when the Knicks are at full strength.
But Rose added him and added Towns to the wounded team that ended up losing Game 7 to the Pacers at home last spring. You know what the Lakers just did? They added one of the great basketball talents in this world, a player like Doncic who is still just 26 years old. This doesn’t mean that Rose or anybody else besides the Lakers had a shot at Doncic, because it’s clear that they did not. But the fact remains that on a team that needed to get better fast, Lakers general manager Rob Pelinka just added a player who nearly carried the Mavericks all the way to a title last season, practically all by himself.
Now he’s with LeBron. It’s like having two LeBrons on the same team. Or two Lukas. Take your pick. Brunson did everything he could until he came down wrong on his ankle. He has been a great player since the Knicks got him from the Mavericks — they’re really on a roll in Dallas, aren’t they? — and become the first true face of the franchise they’ve had since Patrick. He can do so many things. He’s not just LeBron, or Doncic.
The grade for Leon Rose on this season is still incomplete, for sure. And if the Knicks do get bounced early from the playoffs again, it does not change the fact that Rose has, in his own way, done as much as Thibodeau and Brunson and the Villanova Alumni Association to bring the Knicks back. But with this kind of job and stakes like these come accountability, too. If the Knicks still find their way to the Eastern Conference finals (if that’s not the bar here, what is?) then Rose will get all the praise in the world, and have earned it.
But if they don’t, if Towns doesn’t play as big as the games in a month and Bridges is still standing over there in the corner, then the story of this season will have Rose’s byline on it as much as anyone else’s.
Rose has done a tremendous job here, without question. He doesn’t say much, and has mostly let his actions do all the talking. He took over the basketball version of the Jets and made the Knicks matter again. He wasn’t satisfied with where the Knicks were at the end of last season, and did some things. But this is the team he wanted, and paid high to get. There’s still time in the season for the big swing he took to not be a miss. It just doesn’t look that way right now.
MENDOZA REALLY DID AN AMAZIN’ JOB, SOMETHING SPECIAL ABOUT UCONN & TIME FOR GLEYBER TO ZIP IT …
Nothing against Pat Murphy of the Brewers, who did such an amazing job with them last season until Pete Alonso ruined everything, but it’s still even more amazing that Carlos Mendoza didn’t win Manager of the Year.
I asked Mendoza the other day before the Mets played the Cardinals in Jupiter, Fla., what he knows now about the job that he didn’t know a year ago at this time, and Mendoza smiled:
“I understand that everything comes across your desk. It doesn’t work that way when you’re a bench coach.”
He was a first-time manager whose team started out 22-33 and Mendoza didn’t just hold his team together at that point, he watched it play baseball as good as anybody after that, all the way to Game 6 against the Dodgers in the National League Championship Series.
He lost his ace, Kodai Senga, along the way.
His closer, Edwin Diaz, was a theme park ride coming back from that massive knee injury the year before.
He didn’t have Starling Marte for nearly half the season and his kid catcher, Francisco Alvarez, only played 100 games.
It was, in so many ways, one of the great rookie years any coach or manager has ever had around here.
It’s still remarkable that Nico Harrison, outgoing general manager of the Mavericks, was so fixed on the things he didn’t like about Luka Doncic instead of all the things Luka had done on the court since arriving in Dallas.
All this media bickering and back-and-forth in the NBA really is like high school, right?
It would be big fun, starting in the Big East Tournament, if UConn remembers how to do UConn.
And worth mentioning again that what Jim Calhoun started in Storrs, in what had been a Yankee Conference place before he got there, only became a college basketball tale for the ages.
I’m just talking about the men’s basketball side of this, and not Geno Auriemma’s program for the ages on the women’s side.
The UConn men have now won six national titles with three different coaches and, if you’re keeping score at home, you know that since Calhoun did show up in Storrs, Duke has won five.
Whatever happens the rest of the way, LeBron James has already had one of the extraordinary careers, from high school on, in the history of American sports.
It will be interesting to see how the Celtics, as talented as they are, will do in the playoffs on nights when they’re not making a hundred or so 3-pointers.
That television clown who asked Zelenskyy why he wasn’t wearing a suit looks as if he himself dresses in the dark before going on the air.
That’s one thing.
The other is that he’s Marjorie Taylor Greene’s boyfriend, which kind of makes you think anybody’s wardrobe is the least of his problems.
Gleyber Torres. Still talking.
The Adelson family, which owns the Mavs now, they sure know their basketball, don’t they?